


By the Light of the Silv'ry Moon

by SianShanya



Series: Moonlight Serenade 'Verse [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: A New York Mobster Short Story, Bucky as an Irish-Italian First Generation American, Bucky's in there as an infant, But it's Interesting Backstory, F/M, Lucia Barnes the Italian Immigrant, Not A Happy Ending, Not Canon Compliant, Steve is mentioned, This is Entirely Backstory, This is literally all about Bucky's mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 06:05:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9643721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SianShanya/pseuds/SianShanya
Summary: The life of Lucia Palmisano Barnes, best known as James Buchanan Barnes' mother, in dates.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Exactly what it says on the tin. I had a lot of feelings about a woman that I created, and I wanted to write them down as a gritty 1910s mob thriller. I know Bucky has a canon mother named Winifred, but Lucia just came to me, and now I can't get multi-ethnic Bucky who grew up speaking gutter-Italian out of my head. 
> 
> This is the chronological beginning of the 'Verse. Lucia will be showing up again at some point, because I like her a Lot.
> 
> Ahead be both feelings and period-typical anti-Italian slurs. Nothing explicit, though.

Lucia Palmisano takes her first steps onto American soil on July 10th, 1912. 

Her family left Italy a week before, sent by their relatives’ pooled resources because it’s become evident, at last, that their farms will not recover from the earthquakes that destroyed their hometown anytime soon. She has been watching New York City grow larger and larger on the horizon since dawn. By now, it is big enough to swallow Lucia whole. She has only ever seen countryside before, she knows only the wide, rolling fields on her family’s farm near Ferruzano, or the cramped, ancient streets she grew up shopping on once a week. In this place, the world is all buildings that seem to touch the sky, and Italy may as well not exist. The green lady with her torch seems to smile as they dock amongst her skirts.

She is fifteen years old, and her mother, father, and brother follow her off the boat. Follow, because she practically runs, she is so excited. America is smoky, hot, and choked with people, there is nowhere out of the shadow of a building. The streets are so much mud and brick, in turns hard and squishy under her best shoes. Within moments, her stockings are caked in filth. She loves it. The place they land is called Ellis Island, and it involves a lot of lines.

There is a line in front of a desk, and the clerk writes their names in a huge ledger. He puts her down as Lucy and misspells their last name, but Lucia cannot bring herself to care. There is another line for nurses, who open Lucia’s mouth and make her hang her dress and stockings on the wall so they can look her over. Eventually, they shoo her back outside. She guesses they want to make sure no one is sick. Mamma, Papá, and Elio all come out the right side of the nurses’ station, but the nurses won’t let Signora Vespucci, Rosa’s Mamma, leave. Lucia looks on as Signore Vespucci begs, tries to convince the nurses that his wife is fine, but they don’t understand him and they turn their heads. Signora Vespucci is provided with a ticket back to Italy. She isn’t the only one, either. Finally, there is a line for the boat that will take them into the city proper. The air on the wide river smells like dead fish and worse, but Lucia supposes this is just what a city is. As they get off the boat and make their way to their new home, she sees the dirty looks the Americans shoot her, but nothing is going to put a damper on today, because she is not in Italy anymore. This is America, and while she has never seen a real city before today, she knows in her heart this is where she belongs.

Not one of them speaks a word of English, but they have a _Padrone_ who meets them at their lodgings and explains how their apartment and their papers and their jobs will work. He tells them they live in East Harlem, where the rest of Southern Italy has settled, it seems. Life goes very quickly, for a while. Mamma and Papá get the factory jobs they came to America for, and Lucia washes and mends the neighbors’ clothes in return for bits of food or little commodities. Her brother Elio is nineteen, and he went to school before the ‘quakes meant there was no school, so he helps their landlord with the books and takes home a tiny cut of the rents. Their spare money, they send home, back to Nonno Elio or Zio Salvatore for the rebuilding of the family farms. As the months pass, she wonders why they don’t try to learn English or visit the big skyscrapers in Manhattan or anything fun. Papá smiles at her, ruffles her hair.

“In a few years, we will go back home. There is no point in assimilating like some of these people do. We are Italians,” he says proudly, “and we will go home soon.”

Lucia doesn’t want to go home, though. Home means milking goats and collecting eggs and marrying a stupid boy from town, just like Mamma and all her Zias have done before her. Lucia wants to stay in America, even if it means the pale-eyed Irish and Americans call her a guinea and look down at her for not knowing their words. Every week at Mass, she offers her own prayer at the end; _And may we never go back to Italy, Amen._

Factories are dangerous. The machinery is heavy, and the foremen, they care about quotas and profits, not safety and whether or not two teenagers have parents. In the end, they don’t go back to Italy, because there is no one to make them go back to Italy.

Lucia Palmisano and her brother Elio bury their parents on October 3rd, 1912. 

She screams and sobs and clings to Elio’s coat, and at Confession, she whispers that this is her fault, because she didn’t want to go home, prayed for weeks and months to be allowed to stay here in New York. And she got her wish, didn’t she? The Padré tells her it isn’t her fault, doesn’t even want her to say _Contrizione_ for her thoughts, but she feels guilty all the same. But, when Zio Salvatore writes to tell them the family will pay for them to come back to Ferruzano, she’s not guilty enough to stop Elio from saying thanks very much, but they’ll be staying in New York.

So they stay in America, and she’ll never be a farmhand again. But every time Lucia thinks about introducing herself as Lucy like a proper American, she sees Papá in her mind’s eye, so proud of his homeland, and she says ‘Lucia’ instead. She doesn’t know if Elio sees the same thing, but he never goes by Ellis, either. 

Elio has a lot of friends. He has always had a lot of friends, but his New York friends, he goes out drinking with them and he comes back with money, not hangovers. Lucia is a smart girl; she knows the men who come by in their fancy hats and their clean shirts to say hello to Elio and to flirt outrageously with her are criminals. But neither of them wants to die like Mamma and Papá and rent is hard to come by some months if you don’t have a factory job. So, Elio is a criminal, too. And Lucia supposes she is as well, she patches them up after they’ve been shot or knifed on a job, and she pretends to the _polizia_ when they come looking that she doesn’t understand English.

Once upon a time, a year ago in July of 1912, that was true. Now though, Elio’s friend Niccolo, who goes by Nic, he teaches her words and sentences and says her accent is beautiful. Then, he leans across the table by the light of their oil lantern, soft light in his brown eyes, and says “Just like you, Lucia, just like you.” 

She likes Niccolo. He is not a stupid boy from town, he is handsome and smart and his grin is all lopsided and razor-sharp. Elio huffs and crosses his arms when Nic kisses her, but in private, he is happy for her, though he warns that she must be careful, as, “He is an important man, Lucia, much more than me.” That, as it turns out, is very true. Her Nic has two older brothers and two honorary Zios and together, they run the Black Hand gang which in turn runs East Harlem. Being with Nic is easy enough, though. She kisses him when he comes in, moves into his apartment when he asks, and she answers the policemen and their questions with sweet smiles and feigned innocence. She doesn’t marry him, and he says there’s no rush anyway. They are young and in love and that’s all they need. So, she wears the pretty things Nic buys her and flirts with who she has to, for the good of the Black Hand. Before long, everyone who is anyone knows who little Lucia Palmisano is, knows she’s not to be messed with, on pain of death. 

She likes that, too. 

Lucia Palmisano’s brother Elio is arrested on May 14th, 1914. 

This time, when the police come knocking, Nic is enraged. He is certain that Elio has turned on them, and he screams at Lucia no matter how she swears she said nothing and her brother is not stupid enough to be a rat. _“Beata Maria,_ Nic,” she cries, “he would never! Lupo would cut his throat and put him in the river!” That’s not wrong, either. Lupo is Nic’s Zio, and the rest of his name is ‘the Wolf.’

“You think I am stupid, then?” asks Nic, and she shakes her head, but he is like a dog with a bone and he won’t stop now that he’s got it in his head. “I _made_ you, Lucia!” he snaps in the end, when logic fails him. “Without me, you’d be dead in a gutter or on your back for the Sicilians. Don’t you _ever_ forget that.” Then, he smacks her. It is not the first time, and it is not the last, but that is the night she becomes determined to get away from him.

Unfortunately, this is easier decided than done. When she shows Elio the bruises on her arms, he just shakes his head. 

“Lucia, you are his woman and that is the way things are.” he says, earnest and kind and like he isn’t betraying her. “This relationship, it is good for both of us. You must be good to him. Don’t give him a reason to leave you.”

Lucia thinks, _Che cazzo._ She is no mouse; she will not be the dead-eyed wife of a _bastardo_ mobster. She will not bear Niccolo’s anger on her arms and her face. It is a difficult thing she is planning, though. Niccolo is important, and a poor girl from Italy cannot just leave a gang boss. She has nothing of her own, all that she owns came from Nic or her brother. All she has are her wits, and the secrets Nic whispers to her at night when he is drunk. Secrets are currency, but only in the underworld. She won’t marry a cruel man, but it seems she will be gangster’s wife all the same. She will just have to find the right one. 

She starts in Brooklyn, because it’s away from Harlem and the Black Hand. There are Sicilians and Italians in Brooklyn, but they work with Zio Morello and Zio Lupo more often than not, and she cannot trust them. Blood will always call to blood. Luckily for a girl with a lot of secrets to sell, Italian blood is not the only thing flowing along the East River. It takes her two years to build up what she needs, to tease enough from drunken men to buy her freedom and her future. In December of 1916, Elio joins the Army, ready to leave for Europe and the War and to leave her with nothing, no buffer between her cheeks and Nic’s fists but _la grazia di Dio._ And though she is a good Catholic girl, insofar as she can be, she knows God’s grace is in her head and her hands, not in her prayers. She is a good, supportive sister and she tells Elio only that she is proud of him. She refrains from telling him how badly he’s failed her. It will do her no good. 

On December 31st, 1916, Lucia Palmisano takes her head full of secrets down to an Irish bar in Red Hook.

Sitting at that bar in Red Hook is a boy named George. He is Catholic, and her age, but he has four older brothers, and three of them are in deep with Dinny Meehan and his White Hand Gang, which is more or less always at war with the Black Hand. Most importantly though, George is a kind boy. His smile isn’t lopsided or razor-sharp, and he stops to pet the stray dogs in Brooklyn’s alleyways when they walk together through the streets. He’s not all that smart, and she will never love him like she loved-loves still-Niccolo, but he is kind, and he will never hit her, not even drunk. He’s a good mark, in other words. He likes little Lucia, with her dark hair and her pretty face. Her sad story moves him and, determined to be her crusader knight, he asks her to marry him in March. She accepts, and the politicking begins. First, George introduces her to his eldest brother, Jacky. Jacky’s a married man, but he has a baby daughter, so Lucia’s story moves him, too. Unfortunately, in the underworld of New York City, a girl cannot just marry a boy. Instead, she gets an audience with Dinny Meehan, who has some concerns about one of his boys marrying a piece of Italian gangster trash. 

On April 8th, 1917, Lucia Palmisano stands on the docks with Nic and waves her brother off to France. 

That night, Jacky takes her to Dinny Meehan’s bar. He’s a big man, scars on his hands and his arms because he fights alongside his boys. He’s also a smart man, and isn’t swayed by her pretty face. His eyes, like Niccolo’s and Morello’s and Lupo’s, are cold and calculating.

“So,” he says, “why does a little guinea girl wanna come make an honest man outta little Barnes, here?” he is leaning back against the bar as he speaks, lit cigar dangling just so from his fingers. Lucia rolls back her sleeves to show him the finger-marks and the cigarette burns on her forearms.

“I am Niccolo Galucci’s girlfriend, and he is a sack of shit.” she says, matter-of-fact. “I want to leave him, but his family owns all of Italian New York. So, I thought I’d marry an Irishman.” She smiles, slow and wicked. “And, I have an excellent bride’s gift for my intended’s family, if they would hear it.” Dinny strokes his red mustache with his calloused worker’s hand. 

“Bride’s gift, eh? It’ll be information I imagine.” He grins. “It’s any good, and you’ll get protection from the Black Hand, and plenty. My lads are always interested in puttin’ your people in the goddamn river.” She nods. 

“And George?” Because that is what she really needs. An Irish husband, and an Irish last name. Dinny laughs, big and full bodied. 

“Ah, not sure our wee Georgie knows what he’s gettin’ into with you, little dagoe minx. But your stories and your secrets’ll buy you my blessin’ in that, too, sure.” 

She wakes up next to Niccolo for the last time on April 15th, 1917 . She is twenty years old, and she has been in America for just under five years. 

“I am leaving.” she tells him over coffee. He is fairly hungover, and for a moment, he just squints at her across the freshly scrubbed wood of the kitchen table. 

“Lucia, _amore,_ what are you saying?” is the response he finally comes up with. She sighs. 

“I am saying that I am leaving. I don’t want to be with you anymore, Niccolo.” Then, the light is back in his eyes, unimaginably cold. The razor smile she loved so much curls his lips.

“I’m going to work in five minutes.” he says, very casual. “I’ll leave you to think about this, Lucia.” His voice goes quiet and poisonous. “Think it through. If you stay, you are a queen, you are my wife one day. Your brother is a prince, if he makes it back from the War. Leave, and you are _nothing._ ” He laughs, a cruel, harsh sound in the morning quiet. “Nothing, and then very shortly floating in the Hudson. A dead whore, remembered by no one. Who do you think will protect you if you leave me, huh?” She looks down, makes a show for him. Who will protect her? An Irish dog, that’s who, but it is better than this. Anything is better than this. She calls tears to her eyes, and Nic leaves for work with a smile and a song on his lips, because he thinks he has _won._

She takes nothing but her mother’s wedding ring. Everything else in this house is Niccolo’s, and she has nothing but her wits, _needs_ nothing but her wits. Elio will come back from the War, or he won’t, and he will understand, or he won’t. She doesn’t care. Her smiling, friendly brother lost her trust and her love in 1914 when he decided his friends and his fame were more important than her bruises. She tucks her purse over her arm, perches her powder blue hat just so on her dark head, and leaves Elio and Niccolo and her notoriety and all of East Harlem, for good. 

Lucia Palmisano gets married on April 16th, 1917. On April 17th, 1917, Niccolo Galucci is shot and killed by an Irish gangster named Jacky Barnes. His body, ironically, is dumped in the Hudson River.

She refuses to marry as anything other than Lucia. The Irish would rather she be Lucy on the paperwork, but she refuses, and sweet, kind George says he doesn’t care all that much. She hates the name Barnes. It is short and harsh and there is no music in it. But it is Barnes or it is Galucci and between the two, she will take Barnes, no matter how ugly it is. At the very least, George is a handsome man. He is twenty now, her own age, and bog Irish, with thick dark hair and grey-blue eyes. His kiss is gentle and sweet on her mouth. 

His bed is much the same, nothing special, nothing terribly passionate, but passion is for fifteen-year-old girls who don’t know any better. She doesn’t love George, but she likes him well enough. He’s very likable, and she is determined to be so as well, so they get along well. He doesn’t like that she mutters in Italian when she’s angry, but he doesn’t confront her about it, just asks that she not do it outside their apartment. She pushes her face into a contrite expression and says, “Of course, George.” She’s already decided not to be the fiery Italian girl who caught Niccolo Galucci’s dark eye. She lives in an Irish neighborhood now, and if there is one thing the Irish hate, it’s an Italian. 

George goes to France too, eventually. He is drafted and sent abroad in September, a soldier in the 107th battalion, United States Army. She sees him off with a kiss and an extracted promise to come back, _a Dio piacendo._ Over the next few weeks, she wonders idly if he’ll meet Elio out there in the trenches. She hopes he doesn’t get blown up. It would be difficult to find a new Irishman, after all, and as she discovers in October, she is pregnant. It’s-inconvenient. She is a good Catholic girl, but she is also poor, so she knows her way around contraceptives. She’d not used them with George though, because he’s her husband, and a baby makes a marriage that much more secure. That doesn’t mean she wants to have a child while her husband is off in France shooting Austrians. She writes to George, and he is excited as can be. He asks her, if it’s born before he gets home, will she name it something properly American. She agrees, gracious to the last. She is proud like her father was proud, but she’s also smart. If she wants her children to be safe, they’ll have to be Irish. No links between them and the Italian whore who broke Niccolo Galucci with her secrets. He is a dead man now, but his uncles and his brothers are decidedly not.

Lucia Barnes, _neé_ Palmisano, is delivered of a son on March 10th, 1918. 

By that time, she loves him with all her heart, the little blue-eyed child. She wants to name him Arturo for her father, or maybe Benito, blessed. Instead, she names him James. There. It’s not Italian, not at all. He is baptized in late March as James Buchanan Barnes, like the old American President, with Jacky as godfather and his wife Elizabeth as godmother. By the time George comes home in November, she’s already calling their son ‘Jamie,’ because her accent absolutely mangles James. From the moment he sees him, George is wrapped ‘round Jamie’s little finger, and for the first time, she can find love in her heart for her husband, for little Jamie’s sake anyway. 

George is different, after the war. Before he’d gone off to Europe, he’d been determined to be a big shot gangster like his brothers. Now, though, it seems he’s had enough of violence in the trenches on the Front. He gets a job at the Navy Yard and only does work for Dinny Meehan when they’re short rent. He is also adamant, from the day he comes home, that their children won’t be in the family business. Lucia is proud of him for that. She likes the idea of Jamie as an upstanding member of society, for all that he came from the streets. She imagines it, sometimes. He’ll be a businessman, or a doctor. Maybe a military man, a career officer. Not a gangster. 

The other thing her husband brings back from war is a blood-debt. 

He owes his life to a fellow soldier, Joseph Rogers, who is dead of mustard gas in France. Lucia lets George handle the debt, in the form of money sent to Joseph’s wife and son, and a promise that he’ll be there if they need him. Whether Sarah Rogers needs him or not, she doesn’t contact them, and Lucia rather forgets about them, until her Jamie is six years old and brings home a stick-thin and sickly boy from school for her to patch up after a fight. As it turns out, her little Jamie isn’t a businessman or a doctor, or even an Army officer. Jamie is instead a good friend to Steve Rogers, a good brother to his little sisters, and long before his time, long before she is ready to let him go, he is a folded flag and a pair of shiny medals on her mantelpiece. He is an empty grave in Green-Wood, and another at Arlington National.

On July 10th, 1942, Lucia Palmisano Barnes’ only son ships off to war, and she never sees him again.

On October 26th, 1953, Lucia Palmisano Barnes is laid to rest between her husband and her son. She is fifty-six years old. 

Ten years later, her son will kill President Kennedy. Forty-one years after that, he will visit her grave.

**Author's Note:**

> All the Italian comes from Google Translate, and I apologize for any inaccuracies. Che cazzo: Fuck that. Zia/Zio is Aunt/Uncle, and Nonno is Grandpa. I think everything else is pretty self-explanatory. Niccolo and his family are based on the very real Black Hand gang that ruled Little Italy in the 1910s. Seriously, look up Lupo the Wolf, dude was hardcore as fuck. Dinny Meehan and the White Hand gang were also real, and pretty much always at war with the Black Hand. Also really, really, anti-Italian. 
> 
> The earthquakes referenced in the beginning also totally happened, and did completely destroy the town of Ferruzano and much of the surrounding farmland. Yay, historically accurate fanfic.
> 
> Hey, leave comments, even if you're just yelling. I am sorry for inflicting my fanfiction OCs on you all, but please love them. I do.


End file.
